Question

When using regasm and caspol to register and grant trust to assemblies, will it matter under which user account these utilties are executed?

Could there arise a situation where assemblies are registered and/or granted trust only for certain users on a machine or domain?

Answer 1

I believe Regasm must be run by an administrator.

Regasm can read the metadata
within an assembly and adds the
necessary entries to the registry,
which allows COM clients to create
.NET Framework classes transparently.
Once a class is registered, any COM
client can use it as though the class
were a COM class.

Therefore, whatever is done with Regasm will be done for all users. So no, when using regasm there won’t be a situation where assemblies are registered only for certain users on a machine or domain.

Caspol can be run by users other than administrators.

Caspol enables users and
administrators to modify security
policy for the machine policy level,
the user policy level, and the
enterprise policy level. If you do not
currently have administrative
permissions, your default view is the
Users view.

A list of the Security Policy Levels, shows the variations.

Therefore, Caspol allows user and machine specific security policies, and the type of user running Caspol will have an impact on what can be achieved. So yes, when using Caspol there can be a sitation where assemblies have a different security policy based on machine and user.